Imported invoices and other problems...

Derek Atkins warlord at MIT.EDU
Fri May 1 10:24:23 EDT 2009


defaria <Andrew at DeFaria.com> writes:

> Derek Atkins wrote:
>> 
>> defaria <Andrew at DeFaria.com> writes:
>> 
>> 
>> If there is no way to import an invoice then surely it should not import
>> them at all! Yet it did. So what do I do, just delete all of those
>> transactions and re-enter 3 years worth of invoices?!?
>> 
>> It didn't.  It imported the TRANSACTIONS associated with your invoices.
>> The TRANSACTIONS import just fine, but you lose the invoice metadata, and
>> it sounds like you also lost your 'payment' transactions, possibly because
>> your source deals with it differently.
>
> I don't think you understood. Let me try to explain better. Gnucash should
> not import anything if the result of that import would cause the data to be
> corrupted. IOW if importing this causes me to have to delete and otherwise
> patch up 3 years worth of invoices because you can't handle invoices, and
> you know full well that such an account has invoices, then don't import such
> transactions that will cause the end user extra work.

Oh, I understood just fine.  You're just confused about what you told
gnucash to do.  You provided a QIF file that has an account that
contains all your invoice transactions.  There's nothing special about
that account in the QIF file, nothing that says that there's extra
metadata.  In other words, this is data you don't want imported, so
don't try to import it.

GnuCash is doing exactly what you're telling it to do.  The "corruption"
is in the QIF file itself that apparently contains data you don't want
imported.

> You don't operate a business do you? For one, I don't want to ignore
> history. There are times where, down the road, a dispute arises. Having
> solid historical data can help during such times. Also, not all invoices are
> paid at this time. Trying payments and overdue invoices is why I want to use
> software to do this. If it was just a case of "the most recent invoice" I
> could do this as easily on paper!

Actually I do; I have a small consulting company.

What I'm suggesting is that you hand-enter the not-yet-paid invoices
as your migration path.  You're welcome to keep around the old data
so if you need to look at historical data you can still do so, but
just use GnuCash going forward.

> We don't build packages for any Linux distributions, we only provide the
> sources and the distributions build the packages themselves.
>> 
>> I know nothing about Ubuntu, but 2.2.9 is not known most likely because
>> Ubuntu sucks?  (sorry, that was a joke -- seriously, the problem is that
>> the Ubutnu maintainer hasn't pushed out another update) ..  But it's known
>> that Ubuntu has a patch in 2.2.6-3 that causes these crashes. Downgrade to
>> 2.2.6-2 or build 2.2.9 by hand, or complain to Ubuntu.
>
> I first tried to download and install Gnucash. Ran into issues with not
> having the right version of guile. Sure I could spend time resolving
> dependencies (and I assure you have in the past) but I'd much rather have
> somebody else (Ubuntu) do that. I don't think I'm asking too much to expect,
> after years and years, even slightly older versions of Gnucash to be
> resilient and reliable but apparently I am!

Did you run:  apt-get build-dep gnucash
And then try to build GnuCash?

>> OK I can try this when I get home. Still, it would be nice if there was a
>> "New" and/or "Edit" right there in the drop down...
>> 
>> Why?  It's not something that gets edited often; you set it up once and
>> that's it.
>
> It's called convenience and ease of use. It's called what the customer wants
> and the customer is... Well you know.

You're not a customer, you're a user.  If you were a customer then
you would be paying my salary (directly or indirectly).  You're not,
so you're not a customer.

As for convenience, well, the menu item is always available..  And
seriously a UI with hundreds of buttons everywhere just clutters the
window.  Or you wind up with a row of dozens of tiny little icons that
honestly don't mean anything at all to the novice user.

It's very easy (and quite well documented) that all business functions
are available under the Business menu.

> So really adding more points into that interface just clutters the UI. You
> want quick-paths to frequent operations.  You don't need quick-paths to
> operations done extremely rarely.
>
> How is moving something cluttering a UI? You know you could move it. Also,
> having multiple places to do the same thing is something that abundant in
> many software systems. Why the economy here? It really is not that difficult
> to handle the concept of being able to edit terms in multiple places. If the
> "we should limit things to only one place to avoid cluttering up UIs"
> mentality were taken to the extreme the the only way to remove a file should
> be to drop into a command line and issue an rm command - yet Nautilus and
> countless other applications allow you to delete things. Indeed some might
> consider the UI less cluttered if such occasionally done things were not on
> the main UI itself under the menu but rather buried down to where you are
> actually using terms. You see, there are many ways to look at things...

Of course, but not all ways of looking at things are correct.  :-D

If you disagree you're welcome to send in a patch to make it work the
way you think it should.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available


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